Jenny Taylor's blog

Amid the gathering religious gloom, and the regular hammering from the news, it is not just the roses that fling out joy heedlessly on a summer’s day.

Modesty and the politically correct brigade mean that radical goodness is suppressed in the national discourse; but that does not mean it’s not there. We are used to subversion being a dirty word; but subversive love is a far more potent and present force.

‘I was desperate to get away but I was too terrified: they threatened to chop my son's head off and put it in a suitcase, and then kill me and my mum.

'I knew they would do it, too. They're not human,' she said. 'I have no doubt they would have killed me and done it painfully and slowly.’

This is not the testimony of a refugee fleeing a particularly vicious outbreak of retaliatory warfare in Syria, or a victim of a salafi kidnap attempt in Somalia – scenarios from the bottom of the world that sadden each day’s newspaper trawl.